Dave Chandler

CSAP FAIL! Again!

Colorado's public education system has been careening into failure for years now -- and in today's Denver Post, yet another proof.

After a decade of standards-based education, No Child Left Behind, and CSAP high stakes testing, one in three young folks going to college need ... (drum roll) ... remedial instruction.

Pretty bad. But worse is yet to come. Instead of rejecting the standards-based, top-down, one-size-fits-all educational theory, the Bush-Obama/Romer-Owens-Ritter crowd is doubling down on the very same failing regimen.

One of the few new variations on the standards-based theme is the now steroid-hyped obsession with pressuring every kid in public school to borrow massive amounts of money to go to college. With the U.S. economy driving in the debt ditch for the foreseeable future, one has to wonder how all these future college graduates are going pay back their student loans with the low-wage service jobs that they might find.

Oh, of course there is the Obama/Duncan spin on standards-based theory ... test and/or track the teachers, too. In other words, destroy teacher morale.

Oh, and oh, there is also the Obama/Duncan effort to turn our public schools into charter schools with all the privileges of private institutions, but funded by the taxpayer and/or by borrowing money from future generations.

Just as the current incarnation of nationalized standards-based education hasn't worked, the new juiced-up version won't either.

Because ... it disassociates students, teachers, and schools from parents and community.

An answer to this impending educational catastrophe? Below in the essay by John Taylor Gatto.

Nearly One in Three Colo. Graduates Needs Remedial Courses in College, Study Finds | Denver Post

About one in three first-year college students needs remedial help in at least one core subject, according to an annual report by the Colorado Commission for Higher Education.

Remediation rates haven't changed much over the past few years, but state officials are confident that a new system in place to align Colorado's K-12 schools with higher education will begin to show results.

"This is like turning a big ship in the middle of the ocean," said Colorado Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien. "I'd say in the next two school years, we would begin to see kids more on grade level."

Overall, 52.7 percent of recent Colorado high school graduates who enrolled in two-year colleges in Colorado in fall 2008 needed remedial help in math, reading or writing. Nearly 17 percent needed help in each of those subjects.

Nineteen percent of first-year students attending four-year colleges in Colorado needed remedial help in at least one of those subjects. ...

Take Back Your Education | John Taylor Gatto/YES! Magazine/CommonDreams.org

Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.

Only you can educate you—and you can’t do it by memorizing. You have to find out who you are by experience and by risk-­taking, then pursue your own nature intensely. School routines are set up to discourage you from self-discovery. People who know who they are make trouble for schools.

To know yourself, you have to keep track of your random choices, figure out your patterns, and use this knowledge to dominate your own mind. It’s the only way that free will can grow. If you avoid this, other minds will manipulate and control you lifelong.

One method people use to find out who they are becoming, before others do, is to keep a journal, where they log what attracts their attention, along with some commentary. In this way, you get to listen to ­yourself instead of listening only to others.

Another path to self-discovery that seems to have atrophied through schooling lies in finding a mentor. People aren’t the only mentors. Books can serve as mentors if you learn to read intensely, with every sense alert to nuances. Books can change your life, as mentors do.

I experienced precious little of such thinking in 30 years of teaching in the public junior high schools of Manhattan’s ultra-progressive Upper West Side. I was by turns amused, disgusted, and disbelieving when confronted with the curriculum—endless drills of fractions and decimals, reading assignments of science fiction, Jack London, and one or two Shakespeare plays for which the language had been simplified. The strategy was to kill time and stave off the worst kinds of boredom that can lead to trouble—the trouble that comes from being made aware that you are trapped in irrelevancy and powerless to escape.

Institutionalized schooling, I gradually realized, is about obedience in exchange for favors and advantages: Sit where I tell you, speak when I allow it, memorize what I’ve told you to memorize. Do these things, and I’ll take care to put you above your classmates.

Wouldn’t you think everyone could figure out that school “achievement tests” measure no achievement that common sense would recognize? The surrender required of students meets the primary duty of bureaucratic establishment: to protect established order.

It wasn’t always this way. Class­ical schooling—the kind I was lucky enough to have growing up—teaches independent thought, appreciation for great works, and an experience of the world not found within the confines of a classroom. It was an education that is missing in public schools today but still exists in many private schools—and can for you and your children, too, if you take time to learn how to learn.

On the Wrong Side of the Tracks

In the fall of 2009, a documentary film will be released by a resident of my hometown of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Laura Magone’s film, “One Extraordinary Street,” centers on a two-mile-long road that parallels polluted Pigeon Creek. Park Avenue, as it’s called, is on the wrong side of the tracks in this little-known coal-mining burg of 4,500 souls.

So far Park Avenue has produced an Army chief of staff, the founder of the Disney Channel, the inventor of the Nerf football, the only professional baseball player to ever strike out all 27 enemy batsmen in a nine-inning game, a winner of the National Book Award, a respected cardiologist, Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, and the writer whose words you’re reading.

Did the education Monongahela offered make all these miracles possible? I don’t know. It was an education filled with hands-on experience, including cooking the school meals, serving them individually (not cafe­teria-style) on tablecloths, and cleaning up afterward. Students handled the daily maintenance, including basic repairs. If you weren’t earning money and adding value to the town by the age of seven, you were considered a jerk. I swept out a printing office daily, sold newspapers, shoveled snow, cut grass, and sold lemonade.

Classical schooling isn’t psychologically driven. The ancient Greeks discovered thousands of years ago that rules and ironclad procedures, when taken too seriously, burn out imagination, stifle courage, and wipe the leadership clean of resourcefulness. Greek education was much more like play, with studies undertaken for their own sake, to satisfy curiosity. It assumed that sane children want to grow up and recognized that childhood ends much earlier than modern society typically allows.

We read Caesar’s Gallic Wars—in translation between fifth and seventh grades and, for those who wanted, in Latin in ninth and tenth grades. Caesar was offered to us not as some histor­ical relic but as a workshop in dividing and conquering superior enemies. We read The Odyssey as an aid to thinking about the role of family in a good life, as the beating heart of meaning.

Monongahela’s education integrated students, from first grade on, into the intimate life and culture of the town. Its classrooms were free of the familiar tools of official pedagogy—dumbed-down textbooks, massively irrelevant standardized tests, insanely slowed-down sequences. It was an education rich in relationships, tradition, and respect for the best that’s been written. It was a growing-up that demanded real achievement.

The admissions director at Harvard College told The New York Times a few years ago that Harvard admits only students with a record of distinctive accomplishment. I instantly thought of the Orwellian newspeak at my own Manhattan school where achievement tests were the order of the day. What achievement? Like the noisy royalty who intimidated Alice until her head cleared and she realized they were only a pack of cards, school achievement is just a pack of words.

A Deliberate Saboteur

As a schoolteacher, I was determined to act as a deliberate saboteur, and so for 30 years I woke up committed to making the system hurt in some small way and to changing the destiny of children in my orbit in a large way.

Without the eclectic grounding in classical training that I had partially absorbed, neither goal would have been possible. I set out to use the classical emphasis on qualities and specific powers. I collected from every kid a list of three powers they felt they already possessed and three weaknesses they might like to remedy in the course of the school year.

I pledged to them that I’d do my level best inside the limitations the institution imposed to make time, advice, and support available toward everyone’s private goals. There would be group lessons as worthwhile as I could come up with, but my priorities were the opportunities outside the room, outside the school, even outside the city, to strengthen a power or work on a weakness.

I let a 13-year-old boy who dreamed of being a comic-book writer spend a week in the public library—with the assistance of the librarian—to learn the tricks of graphic storytelling. I sent a shy 13-year-old girl in the company of a loudmouth classmate to the state capitol—she to speak to her local legislator, he to teach her how to be fearless. Today, that shy girl is a trial attorney.

If you understand where a kid wants to go—the kid has to understand that first—it isn’t hard to devise exercises, complete with academics, that can take them there.

But school often acts as an obstacle to success. To go from the confinement of early childhood to the confinement of the classroom to the confinement of homework, working to amass a record entitling you to a “good” college, where the radical reduc­tion of your spirit will continue, isn’t likely to build character or prepare you for a good life.

I quit teaching in 1991 and set out to discover where this destructive insti­tution had come from, why it had taken the shape it had, how it managed to beat back its many critics for a century while growing bigger and more intrusive, and what we might do about it.

School does exactly what it was created to do: It solves, or at least mitigates, the problem of a restless, ambitious labor pool, so deadly for capitalist economies; and it confronts democracy’s other deadly problem—that ordinary people might one day learn to un-divide themselves, band together in the common interest, and take control of the institutions that shape their lives.

The present system of institutionalized schooling is a product of two or three centuries of economic and political thinking that spread primarily from a militaristic state in the disunited Germanies known as Prussia. That philosophy destroyed classical training for the common people, reserving it for those who were expected to become leaders. Education, in the words of famous economists (such as William Playfair), captains of industry (Andrew Carnegie), and even a man who would be president (Woodrow Wilson), was a means of keeping the middle and lower classes in line and of keeping the engines of capitalism running.

In a 1909 address to New York City teachers, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity to forgo the privilege of a liberal education.”

My job isn’t to indict Woodrow or anyone else, only to show you how inevitable the schools you hate must be in the economy and social order we’re stuck with. Liberal education served the ancient Greeks well until they got too rich to allow it, just as it served America the same way until we got too rich to allow it.

What Can You Do About All This? A lot.

You can make the system an offer it can’t refuse by doing small things, individually.

You can publicly oppose—in writing, in speech, in actions—anything that will perpetuate the institution as it is. The accumulated weight of your resistance and disapproval, together with that of thousands more, will erode the energy of any bureaucracy.

You can calmly refuse to take standardized tests. Follow the lead of Melville’s moral genius in Bartleby, the Scrivener, and ask everyone, politely, to write: “I prefer not to take this test” on the face of the test packet.

You can, of course, homeschool or unschool. You can inform your kids that bad grades won’t hurt them at all in life, if they actually learn to master valuable skills and put them on offer to the world at large. And you can begin to free yourself from the conditioned fear that not being accepted at a “good” college will preclude you from a comfortable life. If the lack of a college degree didn’t stop Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Michael Dell (Dell Computer), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), Warren Avis (Avis Rent-a-Car), Ted Turner (CNN), and so many others, then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to see that you’ve been bam­boozled, flummoxed, played for a sap by the propaganda mills of schooling. Get rid of your assumptions.

If you are interested in education, I’ve tried to show you a little about how that’s done, and I have faith you can learn the rest on your own. Schooling operates out of an assumption that ordinary people are biologically or psychologically or politically inferior; education assumes that individuals are sovereign spirits. Societies that don’t know that need to be changed or broken.

Once you take responsibility for your own education, you’ll join a growing army of men and women all across America who are waking up to the mismatch schools inflict on the young—a mismatch between what common sense tells you they’ll need to know, and what is actually taught. You’ll have the exquisite luxury of being able to adapt to conditions, to opportunities, to the particular spirits of your kids. With you as educational czar or czarina, feedback becomes your friend and guide.

I’ve traveled 3 million miles to every corner of this country and 12 others, and believe me, people everywhere are gradually waking up and striking out in new directions. Don’t wait for the government to say it’s OK, just come on in—the water’s fine.

Colorado Democrats Nickle-and-Diming Working People

When you pay more to the state government than you did before it's a tax increase. It's a tax increase no matter what Gov. Ritter and the Democrats might say.

The Denver Post reports today that the Colorado state house has given its first approval to eight sales tax exemption repeals -- five of these will cause you to pay more for everyday purchases. And, one of them directly contradicts Ritter's most prominent policy position.

From the Denver Post's list, here are the five tax increases that you will pay:

• Remove the sales-tax exemption for candy and soda, $18 million;
• Repeal a regulation exempting downloaded software from sales tax, up to $20.4 million;
• Eliminate the sales-tax exemption on out-of-state retail sales made through in-state websites, up to $5 million.
• Repeal the sales-tax exemption on nonessential food items such as paper bags, napkins and plastic forks, up to $2.1 million.
• Limit a tax credit for alternative fuel vehicles, up to $2.7 million

If these provisions are passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor, when you buy a diet cola later this year, you'll pay more to the state government than you do now -- that's a tax increase.

If you download a new computer game, you'll pay more to the state government than you do now -- that's a tax increase.

If you want to buy a book from Amazon by clicking through this web site, you'll pay more to the state government than you do now -- that's a tax increase.

If your neighborhood holds a summer block party and you want to use paper plate and napkins, you'll pay more to the state government than you do now -- that's a tax increase.

If you heed Gov. Ritter's exhortations for the "green economy" and decide to purchase a flex-fuel truck in which to haul your used cans and paper and plastic to the recycling center, you'll pay more to the state government than you do now -- that's a tax increase.

By themselves, these tax increase may not look like much of a burden, but the reprehensible thing about the sales tax is that it hurts most those least able to pay -- like Colorado's working class folks already under the strain of the lingering recession. The Democrats like to posture that they represent and advocate for the "little guy." But why then are they trying to nickle-and-dime us to the poor house?

There is more in state government that could be cut. If the CSAP school testing scheme were eliminated, that would save as much as the five items listed above. Furthermore, it is entirely possible that if a rigorous analysis were done we would find that we would be better off if the state got out of this so-called 'Race to the Top' competition that will impose mandates on our schools for years to come.

Mostly, if we had bold, innovative leadership and representation in the state capitol building, we would see proposals to get rid of the sales tax in Colorado entirely. We would all be better off if this regressive revenue source was replaced by a state progressive income tax. Let those individuals and corporations (since the Supreme Court has just reaffirmed that they are 'persons', too) who are most able to pay then provide more for the infrastructure and services from which they benefit most.

For the 21st Century: Improve Existing Roads

UPDATE!

The essay below was published today, Thursday, January 12,2010, in the print edition of YourHub.com for Arvada, Wheat Ridge and Westminster.

However, as I predicted, DRCOG voted to include the "Arvada Tollway" on its Metro Vision transportation plan. See: DRCOG adds Jefferson Parkway to long-range road plan - Denver Post.

---

Here's a question. How many of my Arvada neighbors will pay at least $3.00 for the privilege of driving to shop at the Flat Irons mall? Or round trip, $6.00? Or will even more of us pile onto Wadsworth Blvd. so that we can take U.S. 36 to avoid the toll?

During a time of increased environmental awareness and fiscal restraint, driving further and paying more seems like an antiquated idea. But that is what we would get if the unconnected toll road segment of the metro beltway gets put on the map at the behest of the Arvada, Jeffco and Broomfield governments.

On Wednesday, January 20, 2010, the board of directors of the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) is scheduled to vote on whether or not to include the Arvada tollway in its 'Metro Vision' transportation plan.

Last month I attended a DRCOG hearing on the tollway issue and was gratified to hear broad-based and diverse opposition to the public-private plan offered by the Arvada and Jefferson County governments. Individuals and organizations from around the metro area spoke against the old fashioned tollway notion and in favor of improving existing roads and for more environmentally and fiscally responsible transportation alternatives.

This tollway idea is not a good one for Arvada residents. First of all, as noted, drivers will seek alternative routes to avoid paying tolls and that will increase traffic congestion on Arvada streets. Secondly, we are going to pay big-time for this tollway.

The Arvada tollway plan will directly cost taxpayers a billion dollars -- a "public" subsidy to the "private" part of the road. As noted in a document prepared by Boulder city council member Macon Cowles:

The Parkway does rely on public funding. The Parkway application to DRCOG assumes that “CDOT and/or area governments” will construct arterials and connectors at both the southern and northern ends of the Parkway. See JPPHA Application to DRCOG at 3. The connection and interchanges that will have to be financed by CDOT and/or area governments are circled in red at the map to the right. CDOT has documented their cost at $1 billion.

Most Americans and Coloradoans have had just about enough of government bailouts and handouts to private interests.

As for the Broomfield government's advocacy for an extension of their "Northwest Parkway" tollway? It can be discounted on obvious grounds of self-interest: Brisa, the Portuguese corporation that leases the Parkway, is obligated to give Broomfield $100 million if a southern extension is built.

Furthermore, let's not forget that Broomfield's Northwest Parkway provides us with an example of what happened to the most recently constructed tollway in the metro area. Facing serious economic shortfalls, Broomfield had to lease the highway to the above mentioned foreign company for 99-years.

Now, it would be nice if the Arvada city council would join the 21st century and finally give-up this outdated highway scheme. But since the Arvada council is now composed of a majority of members who hearken back to the 1990s and earlier, their stubbornness in clinging to the tollway concept comes as no surprise.

So what will happen at the January 20 DRCOG board meeting? The DRCOG board of directors is composed of mayors and council members from around the metro area, so the likelihood still is that backroom, 'good ol'boy' political horsetrading will win out and Arvada and Jeffco will get its tollway plan put on the regional transportation map.

However, there is a chance that common sense and the impact of the majority opinion from the public hearing might carry the day. The board of directors of DRCOG have to make this decision: a parochial choice or a forward-looking choice. It can placate a few board members like Arvada, Jeffco and Broomfield by giving them a line on a map, the "Arvada Tollway" -- or it can accept economic reality and reject a scheme that would ultimately cost taxpayers a billion dollars.

Let's hope that a fresh 21st century view of progress prevails in the end and our local governments understand that the best prospects for the future -- for our economy and the environment -- lies in maintaining and improving the roads we already have.

Udall to Colorado: Pay Top Dollar for Drugs

Colorado U.S. Senator Mark Udall is apparently content with what you have to pay at the pharmacy for your medicine. Yesterday, Udall voted 'no' to include the re-importation of drugs in the health insurance reform legislation.

If there is a backroom deal between President Obama and Big Pharma that Udall is supporting, well, that's the kind of government most of us are sick of in this country. Or else, Mark Udall gets lots of campaign contributions for the pharmaceutical industry, or he thinks you aren't paying enough for your medicine.

What is even more disgusting about this development is that the amendment to let less expensive drugs be imported into the country actually passed, 51 - 48. However, because of the filibuster rule, the will of the majority means nothing in our allegedly great democratic, deliberative body.

The United States Senate is a dysfunctional organization.

In a republic, we elect people to legislatures to make laws for us. In the republic of the United States we also believe in the notion that the majority rules ... with proper respect for the rights of the minority.

Once upon a time the 'filibuster' idea was that in the 'deliberative' legislative body of the U.S. Senate, the minority could slow down action causing more time for, well, deliberation ... and persuasion (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington).

Only in recent times has the filibuster morphed into a tactic creating a 'tyranny of the minority' -- both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for this perversion of the original idea.

The current health insurance reform effort accompanied by the radical Republican's calculated political ploy to become totally obstructionist in the federal legislature has highlighted how the filibuster has become an anti-republican, anti-democratic tool. The present use of the filibuster has made the U.S. Senate a dysfunctional body and by extension the whole legislative process as envisioned in the Constitution.

This needs to end. Unfortunately, the feckless Dimocrat Senate leadership is worried about being in the minority again (we can guarantee that if they don't change course now) and want to preserve the perverse filibuster tactic for their own future use.

But we think most Americans understand and support the concept of majority rule and the notion that at least 51 votes out of a hundred is a win.

Under the current circumstances we should call the parliamentary maneuver to change the Senate rules and end the present filibuster regulation "The Lieberman Option," since it is his arrogance and conceit that is precipitating this legislative crisis.

After the filibuster is killed, in short order a genuine, true health insurance reform bill could be passed by majorities in both houses of Congress and the will of the people as expressed in the last election could be fulfilled.

If this doesn't happen then President Obama and the Dimocrat Congress and Dimocrats in state and local offices can watch their 2008 'mandate' collapse.

And, the entire nation may very well witness citizen cynicism and disgust envelop our governmental and political system ... and who knows what will be the consequences of that sad development.

From Wikipedia (Nuclear Option):

The nuclear option is used in response to a filibuster or other dilatory tactic. A senator makes a point of order calling for an immediate vote on the measure before the body, outlining what circumstances allow for this. The presiding officer of the Senate, usually the vice president of the United States or the president pro tempore, makes a parliamentary ruling upholding the senator's point of order. The Constitution is cited at this point, since otherwise the presiding officer is bound by precedent. A supporter of the filibuster may challenge the ruling by asking, "Is the decision of the Chair to stand as the judgment of the Senate?" This is referred to as "appealing from the Chair." An opponent of the filibuster will then move to table the appeal. As tabling is non-debatable, a vote is held immediately. A simple majority decides the issue. If the appeal is successfully tabled, then the presiding officer's ruling that the filibuster is unconstitutional is thereby upheld. Thus a simple majority is able to cut off debate, and the Senate moves to a vote on the substantive issue under consideration. The effect of the nuclear option is not limited to the single question under consideration, as it would be in a cloture vote. Rather, the nuclear option effects a change in the operational rules of the Senate, so that the filibuster or dilatory tactic would thereafter be barred by the new precedent.

So-called "reconciliation", another Senate parliamentary tactic is hardly a viable alternative to passing health insurance reform: it is too restrictive (limited to budget issues) and it's a one shot deal. After 'reconciliation' the Senate is right back with an obstructive radical Republican Senate minority and Lieberman/Nelson/Lincoln available to block any other legislation.

What is somewhat sobering about this development is realizing how quickly the Dimocrats have squandered their control of Congress; they have actually significant majorities in both houses. Yet they will now be perceived as incompetent, unprincipled, easily bullied and corrupt (health insurance campaign contributions).

Here is our prediction: the Senate Dimocrats will not exercise the "Libererman Option." The Senate Dimocrat leadership is too 'dainty' to be audacious enough to use the power the Constitution gives them as a majority.

It is amazing ... the Dimocrats just never seem to come to the comprehension that by NOT EVER being bold and daring, they demonstrate repeatedly to the American people that they really are not tough enough nor principled enough to be given the privilege of governing this nation for very long (since the 1980s anyway). Sometimes, even if you don't win, it is important to display strength of character by taking risks, by being innovative, by being gutsy -- Dimocrats don't seem to be capable of doing this. It means that their regaining of federal power since 2006 will probably be brief.

'Private Sector' Road Will Cost YOU a Billion Dollars (Plus Tolls)

It's a billion dollar tollway that you are going to pay for ... whether you ever drive on it or not. And, you'll get more traffic congestion on all the other regional streets to boot.

The Northwest Quadrant Feasibility Study, done almost ten years ago, noted that Broomfield's Northwest Parkway toll road ends before it gets to Flat Irons/Interlocken and that to connect it up to a new beltway section would cost hundreds of millions of dollars -- nothing has changed since then. Now this critical point is reiterated in a document prepared by a member of the Boulder city council.

You can read the "talking points" below. This particular issue is extraordinarily important to remember as the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) takes up the tollway plan at a public hearing to be held on December 16, 2009. The pro-sprawl Arvada city council is the prime mover for building the controversial tollway segment, all the while letting current major streets and roads west of their city languish and deteriorate. For the Arvada government, encouraging suburban sprawl up into Coal Creek Canyon is apparently worth the safety of travelers on Indiana and McIntyre streets and State Highways 72 and 93, if they can force a 'public-private' tollway for the sole benefit of the planned Candelas development to be constructed on the south border of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons trigger manufacturing facility.

This tollway idea is not a good one for Arvada residents, or anyone else who has to drive in the northwest region of the Denver metro area. First of all, as noted, taxpayers are going to pay big-time for this tollway. Secondly, as drivers seek alternative routes to avoid paying tolls, it will increase traffic congestion on Arvada streets.

What we really need is a commitment from DRCOG and the Colorado, Arvada and Jefferson County governments to make improving existing roads a top priority, way before we even start talking about building a new, unnecessary tollway -- that's just economic common sense in an era of restrained transportation budgets.

So, take a look at the information I have also provided here about how you can participate in the DRCOG hearing. Especially if you are an Arvada resident concerned about fiscal responsibility and improved transportation in our city, please send in your comments urging that the tollway scheme be shelved once and for all.

---

DRCOG Hearing

There is an important hearing regarding the proposed beltway toll road. This is your opportunity to make your voice heard. Beltway toll road supporters must get approval from the Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG). Public comment will be an important factor.

COMMENT IN-PERSON:
DRCOG Meeting Date: December 16, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
Colorado History Museum
Boettcher Auditorium
1300 Broadway, Denver.

If you would like to personally comment at the public hearing, contact Casey Collins at ccollins@drcog.org or 303-480-6744, before December 16, 2009, or sign up that evening to speak. If you plan to speak, please plan to arrive early as the hearing room is small.

COMMENT ON-LINE:
http://www.drcog.org/publiccomment/dsp_postComment.cfm?subjectormeeting=Cycle2_2009_commentsonAmendments

Email: Your comments before Dec. 16 to drcog@drcog.org

Snail Mail: DRCOG Chair, 1290 Broadway, Suite 700, Denver, CO 80203-5606.
Comments received in writing will receive the same consideration as comments made at the hearing.

VIEW OTHER’S COMMENTS:
http://www.drcog.org/publiccomment/dsp_viewcomments.cfm?SubjectOrMeeting=Cycle2_2009_commentsonAmendments

MORE INFO ON THE DRCOG MEETING
http://www.drcog.org/index.cfm?page=Dec.16,2009,PublicHearing

---

PFD Version of Following Document
Download Tollway BECD Point Counterpoint

---

Response to Talking Points

of the Broomfield Economic Development Corporation

in support of the Jefferson Parkway

Prepared by Macon Cowles, Boulder City Councilor
Revision Date: December 3, 2009

TALKING POINT 1: There are reasonable prospects for funding the project, and it doesn't rely on any limited state or federal funding.

RESPONSE 1: The Parkway does rely on public funding. The Parkway application to DRCOG assumes that “CDOT and/or area governments” will construct arterials and connectors at both the southern and northern ends of the Parkway. See JPPHA Application to DRCOG at 3. The connection and interchanges that will have to be financed by CDOT and/or area governments are circled in red at the map to the right. CDOT has documented their cost at $1 billion. Without these connections, traffic on the parkway will be a fraction of that assumed by JPPHA in their revenue forecasts.

For context, the total cost of projects currently in the DRCOG Regional Transportation Plan is $2.5 billion, before adding the $1 billion in improvements that the Parkway “assume[s] to be the responsibility of CDOT and/or area governments.” Id. Since neither CDOT nor any of the local governments have funding identified for these improvements, the funding will starve other projects around the region or elsewhere in the State to support the parkway.

TALKING POINT 2: The project complies with regional air quality standards.

RESPONSE 2: Keeping two sets of books on traffic volume is hiding the air quality effects of the project. Lower traffic volume on the Parkway is reported by DRCOG for air quality monitoring; higher traffic volume is reported for fiscal constraint.

Moreover, there are strict limits on the amount of ozone that can be generated by cars and trucks on highways—and the ozone restrictions are being tightened by EPA. All transportation projects in the DRCOG region have to share the same ozone budget, now and in the future. The Jefferson Parkway takes a slice of the region's ozone budget; future projects of other DRCOG jurisdictions will be therefore left with expensive mitigation in order to demonstrate conformity with an ozone budget that is shrinking.

TALKING POINT 3: It will be a multi-modal transportation solution, in that enough right-of-way will be provided for a future light rail and bicycle/pedestrian trail.

RESPONSE 3: To make the Parkway even a single mode solution—for cars—will take $1 billion of “CDOT and/or area governments!” money to make motor vehicle connections at both ends of the toll road. It would become multi-modal only if someone else—not the Parkway or its sponsors—at some time in the future pays for multi-modal infrastructure in the corridor. The Parkway is proposing to provide no funding for transit or even a multi-use trail along its length.

As a matter of fact, based on the Competing Transportation Facility (“Congestion”) Clause in the Northwest Parkway Privatization Agreement and likely to be demanded by any investor in the Jefferson Parkway, the Parkway will likely sue a) to prevent multi-modal solutions that would decrease traffic volume on the Parkway, and b) to maintain congestion on nearby streets so that the congestion pushes traffic onto the Parkway. Incredible as the notion of a congestion clause may seem, the private concessionaire of the Northwest Parkway has used the Congestion Clause to oppose Broomfield's realignment of 160th Avenue from Lowell west to the Broomfield County Line.

TALKING POINT 4: The project will accommodate population growth in a region that is projected to grow by more than 1 million in 20 years.

RESPONSE 4: This population growth is anticipated across the entire Metro Area; not just the four developments enabled by the Parkway. So the region's transportation dollars should be spent on infrastructure throughout the region, not disproportionately on connections to the sponsors! short stretch of highway.

TALKING POINT 5: Development will occur with or without the beltway, but without it we will not have high paying primary jobs in the high tech fields of aerospace, energy, bioscience, and others.

RESPONSE 5: There is no evidence that the Parkway will boost the number of primary jobs in this corridor. Real growth in primary jobs comes from investing in the education and research institutions like NREL, CU, School of Mines, the Boulder Federal Labs and other institutions that provide a competitive advantage for the state in these fields.

TALKING POINT 6: The beltway will not open preserved public open space to development, which totals more than 30,000 acres in the vicinity. The land that will be developed is private land that is planned for development.

RESPONSE 6: But the beltway and the proposed Candelas development will degrade the value of the public land that has been purchased for tens of millions of dollars by entities other than the Parkway Sponsors. In particular, the Parkway will cut off migration routes of animals into and out of the Wildlife Refuge, grasslands and foothills by putting highway and development on three sides of the Refuge.

TALKING POINT 7: It will be a much safer alternative to travel than the existing highway 93.

RESPONSE 7: The Parkway is NOT an alternative to Highway 93—which is the direct north-south arterial between Golden and Boulder. The daily traffic on 93, plus the future growth of that traffic, will be accommodated not at all by the Parkway. The Parkway will make conditions on SH 93 worse by putting traffic and another stoplight on the highway, while providing no funding to address SH 93's real needs.

TALKING POINT 8: It will be a self-funded toll road, and there is no money set aside in the 2030 Metro Vision RTP for improvements to highway 93.

RESPONSE 8: It is not and will not be self-funded. The Parkway is a stranded segment of highway, whose application to DRCOG makes the assumption that “CDOT and/or area governments” will spend $1 billion making the interchanges and connections to the Parkway that enable enough traffic to get to it in the first place! Money to improve congestion and safety on SH93 will be even more unlikely with the construction of the Parkway.

TALKING POINT 9: The project is not being built to the exclusion of more local arterial improvements, which may be accomplished locally.

RESPONSE 9: There is not much chance of building local arterial improvements if local jurisdictions and CDOT have to spend $1 billion for interchanges and connections to support the Parkway.

TALKING POINT 10: The project will support the creation of an additional 17,000 jobs and $9 million in capital investment over 2 years.

RESPONSE 10: There is no support for this assertion, which is unrealistic even without considering current economic conditions. Any development served by the Parkway will just take future jobs that otherwise would have gone to other DRCOG cities. The Parkway has not told us which cities will forfeit jobs to the development it supports.

TALKING POINT 11: The proposed beltway segment is north of the city limits of Golden.

RESPONSE 11: But the impacts from increased traffic are emphatically within the city limits of Golden and other communities around the Parkway. Further, the Authority's application presumes spending hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to build a 6-lane major regional arterial along the alignment of SH 93 to C-470.

TALKING POINT 12: The Right-of-Way along the eastern edge of the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge was set aside for the beltway at the time the Refuge was established. The project will not negatively impact the Refuge, and furthermore, the land on which the road is planned has been cleared of any environmental issues from the former use on the site.

RESPONSE 12: The grant of a ROW from the Refuge to the Parkway is not automatic, but can follow only if the sponsors demonstrate that the Parkway “minimize[s] adverse effects on the management of Rocky Flats as a wildlife refuge.” Pub. L. No. 107-107, 115 Stat. 1379, § 3174(e)(2)(B)(i).

The sponsors cannot demonstrate this because there are many adverse impacts on the Refuge. For example, the Parkway and related development will actually sever wildlife connections to the grasslands on the East and the foothills on the West. This will leave the Refuge as a peninsula with a highway and an arterial on the East, high density development on the South, and an arterial and 300 feet of strip commercial development on the West.

TALKING POINT 13: The project will provide greater mobility for everyone throughout the Denver Metropolitan region.

RESPONSE 13: Not true. The Parkway will provide greater vehicle access only for a small subset of people with interests or business in four new developments that will be served by the Parkway. Everyone else will be stuck with paying the bill for the connecting infrastructure required to make the Parkway work. Further, the Parkway's own traffic analysis shows that it will make traffic worse on most of the roads in the vicinity of the project. See the Traffic Map attached at the end of this paper.

TALKING POINT 14: Of the 73 alternatives analyzed in the Environmental Impact Statement and reviewed by the Corridor Consensus Committee, this proposed project is on the same alignment as the identified preferred alternative.

RESPONSE 14: The current Parkway proposal was not analyzed in the EIS. Moreover, CDOT abandoned the EIS and never completed it for two reasons: 1) consensus on a Preferred Alternative would be unlikely, and 2) there was no likely source of funding the Parkway, including the $1 billion of interchanges and connections that are not part of the Parkway's application to DRCOG.

RESPONSE 15: Furthermore, there are additional environmental issues not known at the time the EIS was abandoned that deserve further study. They are:

1. The proposed critical habitat designation for the Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse in light of two crossings at Woman and Walnut Creeks;
2. The cumulative effects and impact of the Candelas development along the entire southern boundary of the Refuge (not known at the time of the Conservation Plan EIS is that Arvada would rezone the Candelas property, as it now has, for commercial development up to 180 feet in height on the South). Congestion and traffic associated with the proposed parkway, as shown by JPPHA's own data, including increased air pollution and emissions of criteria pollutants and GHG's in the Denver air-shed, which is already in non-attainment. (1)

---

(1) JPPHA is proposing to cripple capacity on Indiana Street by dropping speeds from 55 mph to 30 mph as a way of driving cars onto the toll road. This will force drivers out of their way and increase the number of miles they drive. JPPHA's own traffic modeling shows increases in congestion and traffic all around the area.

John Andrews' Un-Americanism

Local Colorado uber-conservative commentator, John Andrews, apparently doesn't care much for the philosophy articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

In yesterday's Sunday Denver Post, Andrews wrote in a column entitled "Celebrate a mindful Thanksgiving" this paragraph:

"I was not born free," insisted Lewis, the Oxford don and Christian apologist. "I was born to obey and adore." Much as Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, and Rev. Seawell might bridle at this idea, countless God-fearing Americans (including Frontier's Bedford) would cheerfully assent. None of us is self-made or self-sufficient. Yet many of us forget it's so. Only those who remember are fit for freedom. Thanksgiving Day is about the remembering.

After looking on several internet search engines, I couldn't find the reference for the quotation Andrews attributes to C. S. Lewis; but, assuming the words to be accurate, the notion purposed by Lewis and supported by Andrews is breathtaking: it is a sentiment that any fundamentalist Muslim would fanatically embrace; a belief only the most reactionary Christians would agree with; the credo of all advocates for authoritarian theocracy ... in short, it is an extreme concept that human beings are "not born free" but only "born to obey and adore" 'god'.

Most startling though for a self-promoting American patriot like Andrews is that what Englishman Lewis says is directly contradictory of the founding document of our Republic, the Declaration of Independence. How does Andrews square the assertion that "I was not born free" with these inspiring words?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Arvada: A Colorado City of the 1990s

The results of Arvada's city council elections held yesterday confirm that the municipality is firmly stuck back in the 1990s.

I am not surprise one wit by the outcome ... totally predictable.

The "new" city council membership will look almost exactly like it did in 1995 (four of the members). Philosophically it is exactly the same as it was over a decade ago, in the last century: sprawl at all costs.

The pro-development, cancer cell ideology establishment in the Arvada real estate, social and government circles operates as a traditional political machine; it picks and grooms candidates; it weeds out dissenters; it rewards loyalists; it raises big money for the chosen; and it always tries to crush independent thinkers and/or activists.

Mayor Bob Frie, Bob Dyer, Shelley Cook, Don Allard, Mark Williams ... five out of the seven members were on the council a decade ago. Rachel Zenzinger is a clone of Cook (both former Frie campaign managers) and old Mark McGoff votes with the others just about 100 percent of the time, too.

Look for further tax ballot measures soon; look for more traffic congestion since the agenda is solely devoted to promoting the tollway; and look for more micro-management of small business development in Arvada from this very old "new" council.

The vast majority of folks who live in this city, who are my neighbors, are great people ... Arvada small retail and service business owners and operators are courteous and considerate. But unfortunately, we get an elected government that is far below what the people of Arvada deserve. Perhaps someday the Arvada political machine will be busted up and our city council will be as good as Arvada's people. But that time has clearly not yet arrived.

---

Arvada City 2009 Election Results

District 1

Rachel Zenzinger
2,596
53.6%

A.J. Spano
1,600
33.0%

Robert C. Wolf
640
13.2%

District 3

Shelley Cook
2,935
68.8%

Bob Fifer
1,328
31.1%

At Large

Don Allard
9,384
50.5%

Aaron Azari
9,184
49.4%

An Arvada Council for the 21st Century

The results of this year's Arvada, Colorado, city council elections could take our community a giant step backwards into the last century. At a time when we need 21st century ideas and innovative solutions to economic and environmental challenges, voters can decide to put new people and different perspectives on our council, or recreate a council that looks mostly like it did a decade or more ago.

It is possible that on November 4, we could find the council stocked with five out of seven members being the very same faces that were there in 1999 -- the return of three of who were term limited out or resigned (Bob Frie, Bob Dyer, Shelley Cook), one trying to stay by moving from a district to an at-large position (Don Allard) and one elected ten years ago (Mark Williams). Indeed, Bob Frie has stuck to the council almost continuously since the 1970s, only taking out time to satisfy term limit restrictions (and even then he got himself elected for a term on the Fire District Board!) Bob Dyer has the same story (including being on the Fire District Board), but started his tenure on the council in the early 90s. Shelley Cook was first elected in 1993 and resigned in 1999. Don Allard was an employee of Arvada as an assistant city manager, then upon retiring served on the council twelve years from District One.

We have some serious local government 'junkies' here in our fair city -- they have an addiction to the city council that they just cannot seem to do without. Consequently, after election day, Arvada could have a council that is more a retreat into the past than a harbinger of future progress.

Consider this when recognizing the biggest issue now confronting city government: the recession and declining revenues.

The councils of the 1990s never met a local or regional tax increase they did not support. Rachel Zenzinger, candidate in District One and favored by the entrenched city clique, was reported in the September 24 Arvada Press as responding to a question about what city funding areas should be cut that "the city could also look beyond cuts and find ways to increase revenues, consider service reductions or dip into reserves."

"Increase revenues" sounds like the tax raising councils of the past, not a very forward looking vision for Arvadans.

I would also warn voters to be wary of candidates like Shelley Cook who talk 'green' now, but have a 1990s council track record promoting unsustainable suburban sprawl. Or like Zenzinger who accepts the Jeffco Association of Realtors endorsement and also supports the very 'un-green', "unneighborly," billion dollar "public-private" tollway scheme.

It is time to give some other individuals who have different ideas and come from different political circles in Arvada an opportunity to serve.

In District One, where I live, I'm voting for Robert Wolf because he is a fresh face and will not be beholden to special interests. If I lived in District Three, I would vote for Mr. Fifer because it is time for a different point of view. For the at-large council position (two term incumbent Aaron Azari versus Allard), I'm not voting because sadly it doesn't make any difference who gets elected.

As a firm believer and advocate for popular democracy, I encourage Arvada voters to reject the candidates of an establishment, insider cadre that seems to think that they have a special kind of entitlement to positions on our city council. It is time for a change and a time to open up representation on our governing municipal board to other voices and differing opinions.

It is time to take our Arvada into the 21st century and say good-bye to the politicians of the past.

---

"Unneighborly"

From Dave:

Here is an article written by Golden's mayor that explains quite clearly and succinctly why the tollway idea is a bad idea for our neighbor city and Arvada.

If this proposed tollway were built, who in Arvada District One would want to pay a toll to go the Flat Irons mall? Or to go visit friends in Golden? But it would either be pay the toll or join with the other thousands of motorists looking for alternative routes to avoid paying the toll. Far from easing traffic congestion for most of us, a tollway will make it worse.

And, by the way, I wonder why business merchants around 80th and Wadsworth (or merchants in Old Towne, for that matter) would want even more competition from the new commercial area planned at the intersection of SH72 and SH93 that the tollway is meant to serve?

Shouldn't Arvada concentrate on improving our current business climate and work on building a sustainable quality of life for those of us who live here now instead of encouraging another 20,000 commuters to sprawl up into Coal Creek Canyon?

The tollway plan is distinctly a 20th century notion that's primary purpose is to promote even more residential development south of Rocky Flats along State Highway 72. Consequently, not only is the tollway plan "unneighborly," but it is "un-green" in that it encourages more suburban sprawl, encourages even more reliance upon the individual automobile for transportation, and because of "no compete" clauses in the tollway arrangement means nearby streets and roads will go unimproved.

I hope as time goes by more and more Arvadans begin to understand that a tollway west of our city, owned in a "public-private partnership" is not in the best interests of the hundred thousand residents already here. I hope that a greater spirit of cooperation might be developed with the good people of Golden ... but that means electing new faces and fresher perspectives to the Arvada council.

The Latest Twists and Turns in the Beltway Saga
From: Golden Informer, Oct 2009

By Mayor Jacob Smith

After years of trying to build a high-speed superhighway through Golden, under new leadership the Colorado Department of Transportation last summer dropped the idea. This was good news, of course, but it hasn’t deterred the beltway boosters from pursuing their dream of a new toll highway slicing across our part of the Denver Metro region. Their latest proposal still stands to benefit a handful of developers in grand fashion while nearly everyone else takes a big hit.

Their current proposal is to contract with private investors, possibly through a foreign corporation, to build a new toll highway running between Highways 128 and 93 along the east and south sides of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Their plan has serious problems and impacts:

• It calls for crippling the taxpayer-built Indiana St. in order to force cars onto their new toll highway and Highway 93, reducing speeds by almost half.

• By their own analysis, it will significantly increase congestion on many key roads all across Northwest Denver Metro, including 64th, Indiana south of the new toll highway, and Wadsworth.

• Most egregiously, their proposal will add another traffic light on Highway 93, dramatically increase traffic and congestion on Highway 93, and increase safety problems as well.

Instead of improving transportation, which should be the goal, this proposal makes congestion and safety problems worse. That’s not surprising, since the point of the project is really proposed new sprawl, their Denver Tech Center-style development on the southern boundary of the National Wildlife Refuge.

Because this new toll highway project will have significant impacts to Golden, including large increases in traffic through town, we’ll continue to fight to protect our community. At the same time, we have some very real challenges here in Golden and we are committed to fixing those problems. Golden lies in a narrow valley, and Highways 93 and 6 create significant noise and air quality issues as well as physically separate many of our neighborhoods from the main part of town. We will work with our neighbors to make appropriate improvements to Highways 6 and 93, both in Golden and north of town.

This won’t be easy. Funding any project in the current environment is a challenge. We’ll need to look at all of the options, including federal funding and options like a Regional Transportation Authority. In fact, we’ve already started, submitting a formal proposal for federal stimulus funds to rebuild our highest priority intersection at U.S. 6 and 19th Street. That project would lower the highway, add on- and off-ramps, and create a very safe, comfortable crossing on 19th for bikes and pedestrians. And we have already made substantial investments of city funds in noise berms and other noise mitigation to help those neighborhoods closest to the highway.

There is a lot of work to do, and it won’t be easy, but we are committed both to tackling our community’s transportation challenges and to fighting the projects that harm our community.

---

A shorter version of this commentary has also been posted on: YourHub.com

The Charter School Industry

The Colorado government schools establishment, as we know, is fully on board with the charter schools fad. As we have noted here before, Gov. Ritter and Lt. Gov. O'Brien are decked-out cheerleaders for Pres. Obama's and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" scheme that encourages more charter schools among other "reforms" (it's a blackmail deal -- Duncan will award the big federal bucks only to the states that do what he wants).

I'm against what charter schools have become ... I could support the initial concept to create special niche facilities, Montessori for instance, but what has evolved are essentially private schools paid for with public monies.

Below is an article that explores further how charters have become a vehicle for funneling tax dollars to real estate interests and the corporate educational-industrial complex.

There are two 'Imagine' schools in Colorado: Imagine Charter School in Firestone and Imagine Classical Academy at Indigo Ranch, Colorado Springs.

Charter schools and teacher merit pay and high stakes standardized testing and national standards are really the opposite of 'reform' in education -- this is the inexorable "privatization" and "outsourcing" of our childrens' future to impersonal, mega-transational corporations and faceless governmental educrats.

We need to repeal 'No Child Left Behind'; we need to eliminate the federal Department of Education; we need to end federal and state mandated testing and curriculum -- we need to reinvigorate local control of education; we need to have a good debate and discussion on John Taylor Gatto's ideas about education. There is much to be done ... and so far few willing to challenge the prevailing paradigm.

The Charter Schools Gamble: Speculating on Education | Daniel Wolff/CounterPunch.org

"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.

Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?

It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over half of that is in megaplex movie theaters. EPR’s stated goal is to be "the nation's leading destination entertainment, entertainment-related, recreation and specialty real estate company."

So why charter schools?

According to EPR's website: "We understand that education is among the most vital experiences of life. Movie theatres and charter schools are very different in many ways, but they are alike in this respect: People choose to patronize them. Our experience in financing specialized real estate enables us to capitalize on properties that people choose to visit."

Huh?

EPR, based in Kansas City, Missouri, consists of sixteen full-time employees. David Brain, President and CEO, says his favorite part of the job is: "solving problems and crafting a deal, and creating something really new." The deals that EPR crafts follow corporate policy: their tenants must sign a long-term mortgage or something called a triple-net lease where they (the tenants) pay "substantially all expenses associated with the operation and maintenance of the property." EPR’s charter schools have these triple-net leases. EPR is the landlord; the tenant pays for maintaining the buildings and running the classrooms.

In this case, the tenant is a charter-school operator called Imagine. Founded in 2004, it now runs 74 schools from New York to Arizona involving some 36,000 students. Imagine says its goal is “giving the families quality educational choice” by establishing “independently operated public schools.”

Charters are public schools in that the funding comes from state and local school taxes. Imagine gets a certain amount of money for each of its charter students based on the home district’s per-student expenses. The more kids Imagine enrolls, the more money it gets (and the less goes to traditional public schools.) Over the last few years, charters have been successfully attracting more and more students: in central Ohio, for example, Imagine’s budget doubled in 2005-06 and doubled again the next year.

The money pays for teachers, supplies, maintenance, etc. But the problem charter schools have is getting the capital to buy or lease buildings. The vice-president of policy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools calls it “the biggest challenge.”

What Imagine did was start a real estate arm: Schoolhouse Finance LLC. In central Ohio, for example, this financial arm purchased a building for $1.5 million with a $4.6 million mortgage. But tying up their money in property ends up limiting how much charter schools can expand. So Imagine turned around and sold its buildings as part of a larger sale-lease transaction with a company called JER Investors Trust Inc. This brought in $5.6 million over Imagine’s original purchase price.

Imagine did a similar deal in Indiana, where its real estate arm made $2.6 million on an old YWCA it bought for $1.9 million. In fact, real estate plays a key role in Imagine’s charter school operations: its investments in buildings went from $19 million in 2005 to $297 million in 2008 -- suggesting that charter schools can turn the challenge of finding classrooms to their advantage.

But why does a company like JER think charter school buildings are a good investment?

JER’s founder, Joe Robert, made his killing in the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980's. Through his connections with the Federal Savings and Loan Association, Robert was awarded the largest contract ever at the time ($120 million in assets) to manage and sell the government’s “troubled” properties. He cleaned up, moving from there to handling assets for himself and other investors. By 1986, he was managing a portfolio worth some $7.5 billion.

Soon, JER was working with Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. Its profits only increased with the various mortgage and investment arrangements that helped create the real estate bubble. As a Washington Post reporter put it, "In those days … it was not unusual for Robert to double and triple his money, sometimes within a matter of months."

A high-flying investor, then, who spent some $77.5 million buying into charter schools. A November 2008 story from Las Vegas helps explain why.

Imagine ran a Nevada school called the 100 Academy of Excellence, which -- based on the local per-student cost -- received about $3 million from the state each year. Half of that, the story reports, went to running the school and half went back to the operator, Imagine. Of the $1.5 million Imagine got, it paid almost all of it -- $1.4 million -- to Joe Robert’s company to cover its lease.

That’s an enormous percentage of your budget to pay for classrooms. (And Imagine has high leases in other schools, like Fort Wayne’s MASTer Academy.) But Imagine is a start-up company. It needs classrooms to draw students -- to expand its brand name until it can become truly profitable.

Meanwhile, it added up to a first-rate investment for JER. The tenant (Imagine) had a dependable source of income through school taxes – and, in the Nevada case, was willing to use most of its revenue to pay the lease. The only catch in the formula is the charter has to educate its students on about half what the state spends per-student.

Imagine makes clear on its website how it expects to deal with this. The corporation demands what it calls “economic sustainability” from all its schools. “Each school must spend less each year on school operations than it receives in revenue from the government and other sources.”

But if the district determines how much it costs to educate a child – and sends money to Imagine based on that formula -- how can the charter school do it for less? In the case of the 100 Academy of Excellence, the principal told a state official that money was saved by letting go veteran (read expensive) teachers and increasing class size (read cost saving).

That guaranteed that the rent got paid. But it didn’t guarantee the quality of the education. 2006-07 test results from the 100 Academy of Excellence fell below national standards and put it on the state’s “Watch List” for failing schools.

The academy’s landlord, JER, didn’t need to bother about such matters. Or about Imagine’s profitability. In fact, though Imagine brought in $131 million in the 2006-07 school year, it ended up losing $2.3 million. But JER hadn’t bought Imagine; it had bought the real estate: the school buildings with Imagine as the tenant. As long as the tenant lived up to its lease, JER had a sweet deal.

It might have continued, except the real estate bubble burst. In two years, JER’s publicly traded stock went from $23 a share to zero – and was “delisted” from the New York Stock Exchange. Robert started selling off his assets, including the charter school buildings. That’s when Entertainment Properties stepped in, buying the properties complete with triple-net leases.

“The charter public schools,” says EPR’s David Brain, “offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”

So it has been. Nationally, the number of students choosing charter schools has quadrupled in the last decade. In EPR’s words, “people chose to visit them” -- just like mega-theaters. That will continue as long as parents are disappointed in traditional public schools, and operators like Imagine successfully market their brand of “quality” education.

But what if charters don’t provide better test results (as some recent studies have shown)? What if families decide they don’t offer a better choice? Then the numbers will decrease, and the per-student revenue stream will start to dry up.

Other scenarios could also affect revenue. What if tax-payers revolt against their money being used to make a profit for private companies? What if the economy doesn’t recover quickly? Or, using less drastic possibilities, what if the states’ educational funds continue to be strapped: what a director of the National Education Association calls the current “lack of funds overall”? Even with the current stimulus money, many school districts are having to tighten their budgets. And that stimulus money will soon disappear.

It’s easy to imagine what happens once charters fail or start to shrink. The flow reverses: public schools are flooded with returning students. But now veteran teachers have been driven from the system. Young educators working with over-sized charter classes have burnt out. Plus, having shrunk their physical operation, public schools will suddenly have to find classroom space.

If the recent failure of the economy has taught us anything, it’s that all investment is speculation. We’ve seen the supposedly guaranteed income of everything from retirement funds to home prices collapse. In the face of these kinds of reversals, investors like EPR could probably recoup some of their losses (as JER did) by selling off their school buildings.

But should the speculation that is charter schools fail, where does that leave the nation’s educational system? And our kids?

Obama Still WRONG on Education

Sadly, President Obama and his corporate/military Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, think that the sole measure of an education is how a child performs on a three week battery of high stakes standardized tests.

Learning and real education encompasses more than time stuck in a preformed-plastic desk ... time to "chill" with friends, exploring the real world, thinking, playing, etc. are activities also very critical to the development of kids as whole people.

Obama and Duncan and the purveyors of the current schooling fad of "accountability/testing/standards" (ie, the corporate education-industrial complex) would turn our children into burned-out drudges if they get their way.

A return to local control of schools to the people closest to them would be a more important step than making kids spend more time inside the concrete and glass walls. Letting teachers actually teach without all the top-down curriculum mandates from federal and state governments might really return some learning to our schools. And, ending the nightmare of 'No Child Left Behind' and its deadening testing regimen would be a huge step in returning schools into places of creativity and the joy of learning instead of places of bureaucracy, 'zero tolerance' oppression and regimentation.

If President Obama and Arne Duncan propose and pass a new federal mandate that forces our public schools to make kids spend more time setting in desks, then look for the homeschooling and private school population to explode, as even liberals and progressives say enough is enough of the testing, testing, testing of their children.

More School: Obama Would Curtail Summer Vacation | Associated Press

Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.

"Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom."

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll.

But she doesn't want a longer school day. "I would walk straight out the door," she said.

Domonique Toombs felt the same way when she learned she would stay for an extra three hours each day in sixth grade at Boston's Clarence R. Edwards Middle School.

"I was like, `Wow, are you serious?'" she said. "That's three more hours I won't be able to chill with my friends after school."

Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools. Early results are positive. Even reluctant Domonique, who just started ninth grade, feels differently now. "I've learned a lot," she said.

Does Obama want every kid to do these things? School until dinnertime? Summer school? And what about the idea that kids today are overscheduled and need more time to play?

___

Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

"Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Duncan told the AP. "I want to just level the playing field."

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it's not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

___

Regardless, there is a strong case for adding time to the school day.

Researcher Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution looked at math scores in countries that added math instruction time. Scores rose significantly, especially in countries that added minutes to the day, rather than days to the year.

"Ten minutes sounds trivial to a school day, but don't forget, these math periods in the U.S. average 45 minutes," Loveless said. "Percentage-wise, that's a pretty healthy increase."

In the U.S., there are many examples of gains when time is added to the school day.

Charter schools are known for having longer school days or weeks or years. For example, kids in the KIPP network of 82 charter schools across the country go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., more than three hours longer than the typical day. They go to school every other Saturday and for three weeks in the summer. KIPP eighth-grade classes exceed their school district averages on state tests.

In Massachusetts' expanded learning time initiative, early results indicate that kids in some schools do better on state tests than do kids at regular public schools. The extra time, which schools can add as hours or days, is for three things: core academics — kids struggling in English, for example, get an extra English class; more time for teachers; and enrichment time for kids.

Regular public schools are adding time, too, though it is optional and not usually part of the regular school day. Their calendar is pretty much set in stone. Most states set the minimum number of school days at 180 days, though a few require 175 to 179 days.

Several schools are going year-round by shortening summer vacation and lengthening other breaks.

Many schools are going beyond the traditional summer school model, in which schools give remedial help to kids who flunked or fell behind.

Summer is a crucial time for kids, especially poorer kids, because poverty is linked to problems that interfere with learning, such as hunger and less involvement by their parents.

That makes poor children almost totally dependent on their learning experience at school, said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, home of the National Center for Summer Learning.

Disadvantaged kids, on the whole, make no progress in the summer, Alexander said. Some studies suggest they actually fall back. Wealthier kids have parents who read to them, have strong language skills and go to great lengths to give them learning opportunities such as computers, summer camp, vacations, music lessons, or playing on sports teams.

"If your parents are high school dropouts with low literacy levels and reading for pleasure is not hard-wired, it's hard to be a good role model for your children, even if you really want to be," Alexander said.

Extra time is not cheap. The Massachusetts program costs an extra $1,300 per student, or 12 percent to 15 percent more than regular per-student spending, said Jennifer Davis, a founder of the program. It received more than $17.5 million from the state Legislature last year.

The Montgomery County, Md., summer program, which includes Brookhaven, received $1.6 million in federal stimulus dollars to operate this year and next, but it runs for only 20 days.

Aside from improving academic performance, Education Secretary Duncan has a vision of schools as the heart of the community. Duncan, who was Chicago's schools chief, grew up studying alongside poor kids on the city's South Side as part of the tutoring program his mother still runs.

"Those hours from 3 o'clock to 7 o'clock are times of high anxiety for parents," Duncan said. "They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table."

Dog Whistle Racism on Colorado Radio

Let's be frank, we have a "mainstream" radio talk show host here in Colorado that daily blows the dog whistle for those folks who are angry, bitter, and resentful about an African-American in the White House to hear.

Formerly center-right radio talker Pete Boyles has jumped into the cesspool of the lunatic right-wing fringe with his decision to become the chief spokesperson in Colorado for the so-called 'birther' movement. Indeed, so in the tank is Boyles for the radical right that his KHOW web page (at least it did this morning) features a top line photograph and link to Obama Kenyan birth certificate hoaxer, Orly Taitz.

In my opinion, that the basis for 'birthers' is race or exploiting race-based fears or they willing are dupes for bigotry is obvious with very little analysis. The whole point of the smear that President Obama was not born in the United States is that -- "he is not one of us."

Obama is President illegitimately.
Obama is a foreigner.
Obama is an African.
He's black.

Obama is not one of us, not really an American.

It really is that simple.

'Birthers' feed on doubt, suspicion, fear, disunity, resentment.

Boyles's discomfort over an African-American holding the presidency is so deep that he is the prime sponsor for the display of billboards on I-70 going up later this week asking "Where's the Birth Certificate?"

Of course, Barack Obama's birth certificate has been available for viewing for quite a long time. Here's all the proof a reasonable person could ask for: FactCheck.org; PolitiFact.com; Snopes.com.

Now, Boyles often on his show thinks he is being very clever in deflecting charges of racial antagonism towards the President by attempting to inoculate himself, asserting that anyone who raises the issue of race is de facto conceding the argument. (Boyles is employing logical fallacies 'ad hominem' and 'Appeal to Ridicule'.) But, you know, sometimes, as Sigmund Freud allegedly said, "A cigar is just a cigar." Sometimes, despite protestations to the contrary, race-baiting is race-baiting.

What makes me highlight this topic today is the death threat received this past weekend by another local radio talker, David Sirota (who fills in for Jay Marvin on AM 760 from 7:00 to 10:00 A.M.)

The point is that the intolerance and suspicion perpetrated by 'birthers' like Boyles and his followers have real, potentially dangerous consequences.

Sirota explains what happened to him on his blog in the post: On Racism, Death Threats & The Blindness of Those Who Will Not See.

I appeared on CNN this weekend with Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer to discuss the racial undertones of the tea party protests. You can watch the clip here. ...

... Yes, last night I received a full-on death threat from a person promising to kill me if I dare discuss the racial undertones of the froth that Glenn Beck and other political terrorists are clearly encouraging. I went through the process of contacting the authorities, and the police responded very quickly, which was reassuring. ...

In my judgment, this is the direction that Boyles and his primary resource WorldNetDaily.com, are surely unintentionally (surely, these people do not want to see others hurt ... surely) leading some people.

Denver area radio listeners, and all good folks concerned for civility and decency and reasoned debate and passionate discussion, should let KHOW and Peter Boyles know that race-baiting directed towards the President of the United States is unacceptable.

Perhaps the ugly taint emanating from the radio waves on KHOW Monday through Friday from 5:00 to 9:00 A.M. will make some advertisers on that program uneasy about their associations. For the sake of harmony and understanding in our community, I certainly hope that either his sponsors or Clear Channel management will call a halt to Boyles' divisiveness and intolerance.

Colorado 'Personhood'? Abolishing Your Privacy?

A word of warning for Colorado voters: the American Taliban are back with their attempt to impose their extremist religious and moral rules on everyone.

The 'personhood' initiative was overwhelmingly defeated in 2008, but the religious radicals who petitioned it onto the ballot then are back for a 2010 redo (first report below).

The point of their proposal can best be explained by this analogy: once a knitting needle touches a skein of yarn, you instantly have a sweater. Indeed, even if you keep the needle and the yarn separated, say in different compartments of your knitting basket, you are intentionally and immorally keeping a sweater from being made.

This is essentially the argument that the radical anti-abortion crowd makes about human egg and sperm.

The warning is this (noted in the second link below): these extremist's agenda is to mandate their radical, narrow Christian theology about human reproduction and sexual mores into the depths of your private life.

Let's hope that there are enough sensible Colorado citizens that this ill-advised initiative does not get the required signatures to get on the November 2010 ballot. If it does, however, we need to be ready to put this repressive idea back into the Dark Ages where it belongs.

Abortion Foes Start Push for 'Personhood' Measure | Associated Press - August 25, 2009

Colorado abortion foes are launching another campaign to amend the state constitution to give legal protections to human embryos.

Supporters said Tuesday they'll begin collecting signatures to get it on next year's ballot.

The measure is often called a "personhood amendment" because it grants embryos the legal status of a person.

Last year, voters decided 3-to-1 against a similar measure that defined fertilized human embryos as people.

Backers say the wording may have confused voters and led them to visualize chicken eggs. They say the new version will use the term "the beginning of the biological development" instead of "fertilized."

Anti-Abortion Group wants to Make Birth-Control Illegal in Florida | Orlando Sentinel - September 11, 2009

A nationwide anti-abortion group launched an effort in Florida Friday to outlaw all abortions and certain types of birth control, including oral contraceptives and the morning-after pill.

The religion-infused movement, called "Personhood Florida," would define conception in Florida's constitution at the "biological beginnings," supporters said -- when the sperm meets the egg. The group filed its amendment today but the exact ballot language is still being worked out, said Secretary of State Spokeswoman Jennifer Krell-Davis.

The amendment seeks to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. Also criminalized: the morning-after pill and oral contraceptives taken by women, known as the pill. "There are some (birth control) methods that kill a child," said Pat McEwan, who is leading the Personhood Florida group. ...

... Supporters say they're pushing the personhood amendment not only in Florida, but in a dozen other states.

Obama's School Daze

All right, I'll wade into this controversy manufactured by right-wing subversives over President Obama's planned telecast speech to school kids next week. Because, yes, the nut cases have sufficiently hyped their paranoid hysteria such that I received a robo-call from Pomona High School in Arvada this morning offering all the details for that school's airing of the Obama address.

The big picture observation for me is that this is yet another little piece of evidence that the social contract and the cultural consensus that has kept us functioning as a civil society in this country is pulling apart. The cynicism is furrowing so deeply now amongst the populous that any incident is immediately ripe for exploitation by those promoting racism, resentment and rebellion -- namely the lunatic right-wing. The direction of this decline in rationale thinking will be a degradation of civil behavior as well. If this bitter minority does not come to its senses soon, there will be violence and chaos.

On the level of day-to-day political maneuvering, I'll make four or five points.

First, I wish President Obama were keeping his mouth shut and not wasting our children's classroom time next week. On the other hand, students listening to his platitudes about studying hard means that at least they will not be undergoing standardized testing for thirty or forty minutes. Really, public school is so filled with non-learning activities that kids would derive greater benefit if teachers kept their own teaching time to themselves instead of handing it over Obama.

That highlights, I think, the triviality of this 'controversy'. President Obama's address to students isn't sinister indoctrination, its actually just another waste of time.

Second, however, there is the other point that Obama's education policy is at odds with what he will be exhorting the kids to do, that is, learn and succeed. The accountability/testing/standards schooling theory that Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are advocating is destructive of the impulse of children to learn, investigate, think, explore and grow. So, the words President Obama may speak will undoubtedly sound wonderful and inspirational -- but his policies and proposals as president for education are debilitating and demoralizing for students, teachers and parents.

Third, the right-wing's attacks on the President for this speech are certainly ironic considering Obama's python-like embrace of George W. Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' scheme. In other words, on substance the extreme right doesn't have a clue what they are upset about except that frothing-at-the-mouth radio talkers and sore loser Republican 'leaders' are telling them that they need to be outraged.

Fourth, even on the superficial level the charges and accusations and hysteria coming out of the mouths of the right-wing demonstrates that they don't have a clue what they are upset about. What more proof do you need that public and private education -- for conservatives anyway -- has been a failure. Such a lack of critical thinking and the manifestation of blatant ignorance is, well, astounding. No wonder the Republican Party is experiencing death throes. It takes a genuinely mush-filled mind to repeat radio talk show mantras about Obama being a Nazi and a Marxist both at the same time. If there ever was a national herd of sheep in the American political culture, it is the teabagging, townhall screamers, "where's the birth certificate" mob.

Finally, well, how can you feel any sympathy for the Obama White House for having to endure this insanity? They rolled out the red carpet inviting this kind of abuse. When you win a great electoral victory promising 'change' and purporting to offer 'hope' to average Americans, but upon taking office you deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts to corrupt bankers; you don't end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; you run-up nine trillion dollars of federal debt and don't repeal the Bush tax cuts and actually increase the military budget; when you stand on the verge of making your 'principled' stand for what amounts to the Republican version of health care reform ... well, nobody is going to respect you.

What this means for us specifically is that the Obama speech to students controversy elicits a "pox on both your houses" attitude. For the future of the nation it is simply a sign of the coming times.

---

Arne Duncan and the Chicago Success Story: Myth or Reality? Jitu Brown, Eric (Rico) Gutstein, and Pauline Lipman/Rethinking Schools Online

---

More NCLB Failure

The 'No Child Left Behind' method of accountability/testing/standards took yet another hit -- it just isn't working.

Colorado's CSAP high stakes testing is part of this sterile, dead-end educational "reform."

Since the fifty state, federally mandated testing mania has been fully in place, SAT scores have declined.

As reported in today's Denver Post:

Through the early 1990s and early 2000s, average scores on the SAT college entrance exam moved steadily upward. Now, for the last five years, they've been drifting back down.

SAT Scores Dip for High School Class of 2009 | Denver Post

If the top-down accountability/testing/standards methodology was doing what is was supposed to, SAT scores should be consistently rising, no matter what the demographic mix of students taking the test.

Colorado Testing Mania is Clearly Failing

By the way, did you see the news report in this past Friday's Denver Post that relates to us that "Denver high school students have performed poorly on Advanced Placement tests during the past five years"?

We've had our public schools operating under this 'accountability/testing/standards' theory now since Roy Romer was governor of Colorado ... and saw this schooling method accelerated under Gov. Owens, inspired by his pal George W. Bush. Today, we see Gov. Ritter and Lieut. Gov. O'Brien and President Obama wanting even more money and resources allocated into this scheme.

What have we to show for over ten years of this standards and testing mania? Drop-out rates climbing, their own test scores stagnating or declining, remedial college classes expanding ... and students performing poorly on Advanced Placement tests.

And the Denver Public Schools answer to this failure? "... all freshmen, sophomores and juniors will take the PSAT, a college-readiness assessment, in October."

Even less instruction time and even more testing!

The quacks are indeed running the schools.

Advanced Coursework is Pushed in DPS | Denver Post - August 21, 2009